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The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
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80% of consumers now rely on zero click results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15 to 25%. This is according to a Bain & Co. Article titled Goodbye Clicks, hello AI zero click search results Redefining Marketing this represents the most dramatic shift in search behavior since Google's inception. The reality is that traditional SEO metrics are becoming obsolete overnight. Rankings still matter, but traffic is declining even when visibility increases. Enterprise SEO teams are caught between explaining dropping traffic numbers to executives while trying to prove that their strategies are actually working. The challenge isn't just measurement, it's communication. How do you forecast success when the fundamental relationship between visibility and traffic has been severed? The stakes couldn't be higher in complex B2B sales cycles where attribution was already difficult, SEO professionals now need entirely new frameworks to demonstrate value. So how do you measure and forecast SEO performance when zero click searches are becoming the norm? I'm Jordan Cooney and joining me today is Lindsey Nelson, VP of SEO at Symphonic Digital, a performance driven agency managing over 70 million in media spend across 300 clients. Symphonic specializes in solving complex marketing challenges for enterprise brands, navigating extended sales cycles and multi touch attribution. Today, Lindsey will share her framework for forecasting and measuring SEO success in an era where traditional metrics no longer tell the complete story. Lindsey, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
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C
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about this time of uncertainty, but looking to the future with it.
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B
Absolutely. So Lindsey, tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into SEO, maybe even a little bit about Symphonic and what you do there as well.
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C
Yeah. So a little bit about me. I've been in SEO for about 13 years and I think anybody that's been in the industry for anything more than a decade kind of fell into it at some point. There wasn't like a college degree that you took to be an SEO and I was at a development agency Building large e commerce sites and kind of fell into the world of search and was obsessed. Immediately learned a lot on the job. And it's kind of. You learn by fire. And I still think that's kind of the best way to learn it today is you just have to be in it. You can take any course you want, but until you get in the weeds, it's just, it's all theoretical. So then works my way through a number of agencies and have worked with some fantastic brands. I really have a love for B2B lead gen. It's really where my home is. And then in the last few years here I've been at Symphonic Digital building out the SEO team as heading up this division of such a fantastic group of folks. And we really built out this team based on the historical foundation of Symphonic, which has also been around for about 13 years and had a really strong hold in the media side, a fantastic media performance agency and needed to continue to service clients in the world of SEO. And we see this as a major growth for the business and also for our clients where this is more important today than really it ever has been. As much as people every day like to say SEO is dying, I think I see investment.
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B
Is it dying, Lindsey?
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C
It's always dying. I think that's just kind of the trope that we hear. But I, I see more investment in SEO than media at this point in history. It is investing into the future and into something that is much more tangible and measurable, I think today than even any advertising scheme you can do.
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B
Right. I mean, I think one of the first key components to this entire effort of scaling what is SEO organic digital efforts is, is communication. And one of the first questions I have for you is around communication and how you're looking at communicating with executives when right now, in this particular moment, traffic is down quite significantly. But oftentimes what we're seeing is that leads are up or leads are maintaining the same volume that they did just a year ago or if not growing and accelerating. Especially with a lot of the recent changes Google's made around tracking. We're seeing both traffic and in some cases now, quite consistently, impressions going down. So how are you communicating that with executives?
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C
So I think with executives, the number one thing you have to know is they care about money and making more money for their business. And I think SEO's got continue to, but historically have really been caught up in metrics like traffic and impressions. And it's easy. Those are easy things for us to track and measure against. But I don't think that ever really mattered to any CEO. How many impressions we had on a Google search results page, what they care about is their business growing, is our pipeline growing, what do we look like for the next two to five years? And that doesn't change in this space. We still need to look at reporting in terms of the dollars and not keeping it really surface level like just GA4 or Adobe. We need to look at all of it. Are we in Shopify? Are we integrating HubSpot Salesforce data into our Looker Studio reports? We have to have full scale reporting tied into SEO so that we can show that monetary value. And if we are consistently showing return on investment, it's an easy yes, it really is. It's hard to say no when we are making them more money at a fraction of the cost again of an ad budget to get the return on investment that we typically see for SEO. And then I think the second piece I would say is kind of a non negotiable here is really continuing to listen and ask questions. I think we try to force metrics and we don't ask what does the business care about today? And that matters so much and it changes. So what matters today could be entirely different than what mattered six months ago. Their products line, whatever tariffs are doing to their business could entirely change what their focus is. So true. And we need to listen as SEOs to those things. We can't get caught up in the world of Google.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean I think listening to our clients needs is something that has been a real challenge with the disruption that's happening in the market. Right. And just taking a deep breath with all the noise that's happening to say hey, what do you need? What are you trying to solve for? And then let me go take all this information and all this change and try to put it into something that's useful on that point. If we're thinking about where many of these conversations start, which is forecasting, thinking about the future, how are you thinking about that forecasting conversation and more specifically, how are you presenting that information when forecasting is changing so rapidly and historical figures aren't the same as they used to be.
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C
Yeah, it's hard, honestly. And I think it's hard for everybody and I think it's okay for us to admit that to our clients, admit that to each other, that I don't think anybody has the perfect answer. I was just talking to a client that they had worked with. Leadership and impressions was going to be a core metric for Them they wanted to be at 40% in impressions to their website this year and I had to call her and say, hey, this isn't going to happen.
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B
Right?
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C
And it's not performance. It is not based on that the website is doing poorly or our work isn't working anymore. It is strictly how is being reported out today and we have to just level set. So again, constant communication. I don't want it to be at reporting time and we're like, oh by the way, reporting has changed and impressions are down. I don't want to use terminology like you've been hit with something because then clients kind of freak out or performance is down. It's how we use our words of understanding. This is something that's happening across clients. We can look at other dashboards and see what's happening consistently. This is a new norm. So we can't rely on things like impression. So how do we continue to move forward with forecasting, I think is that we have to rely on first party data a lot of the time. Again we're looking at things like what's happening in HubSpot, their backends, what's happening in Salesforce, what's happening in Shopify, whatever systems they're using, we have to be a part of that. That has to be a part of the. I don't even trust GA4 data anymore. We're at about 50% of accuracy with cookies. So it's like every year we're continuing to degrade the data that we have and so we have to rely on things that they care about as well, which is those internal money metrics. And I think our forecasting has to relate to that. We just have to.
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B
Yeah, I mean there's so much change that's just going on in the market. That historical piece is a struggle and that communication around core business KPI's revenue, KPI's conversion. KPI's is such an important one to really master at this particular point in the journey. As you think about where we go with strategy implementation, what we want to deploy when it comes to SEO and SEO efforts. Right now there's so much disruption, there's so much noise. There's so much noise about AI and AI traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT and others. Candidly, I think there's many publications out there that clearly stipulate that this traffic volume is quite low, 1% or less of the overall traffic for many brands and businesses. But the noise and the hype creates a lot of uncertainty and many executives are asking for what's new, but the reality is that there's a lot of fundamentals. How are you communicating the fundamentals? How are you balancing between concepts like LLM Txt versus having good site maps and ensuring that the fundamentals of SEO are still at play in these conversations?
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C
Yeah, education is so important in our role as SEOs and not using terminology and phrases that are kind of over people's heads. I think there was a period of time where we just like to use a lot of buzzwords and maybe still do, but we have to explain the things that matter. Because yes, I get asked every day, how are we showing up in ChatGPT? And you know, it's one of those pieces where we have to stop and say, yes, I understand this matters and this matters to your business. I hear you. And we have tools that can give us indicators. But I think also educating on none of these tools have reporting right now. So I was on a client call and they Googled like AI reporting tools and they're like, there's like three pages of them. We can just pick one. And I said, okay, hold on. None of these can actually give you real data. So there is no reporting from ChatGPT today. Perplexity is not telling us what questions and interactions people are having. So everything is very speculative. So we can use these tools directionally. We could say, hey, we're starting to see these things pop up. Or with how this tool prompts these engines, we can understand that X brand shows up more than Y brand. But we also need to level set in. The Internet is changing. People aren't searching for keywords anymore. Even in Google, we have seen such a shift in. In human behavior. We can't even track against individual keywords the way we did before. Right. Cause that's just not how people are using the Internet and using exploration. We're talking like humans instead of how Google has trained us to where it's query modifier, bigger modifier, long form. It's just not that way anymore. So I think having these conversations and sometimes it's a, let's work through it. I think one of my favorite exercises that I did in a larger group was, okay, we're all going to open ChatGPT and put in the same prompt and then we're going to prompt it again. And it gets to a point where we're in totally different worlds, completely different answers in different spaces. And so it gives a little bit more perspective on. We can't just say that there is a one answer to this. So making sure we're demonstrating and explaining how things function at its base level. And it comes back to, I think SEOs need to have fundamental knowledge of how LLMs work, how AIO works. We can't just go out there and start using ChatGPT and say, yeah, we can do Geo or, you know, whatever word acronym you want to use, like, because we need to have fundamental knowledge first. And I think that's the critical piece of this. And then we can communicate that knowledge in a reasonable way to our SEO context and to leadership as whole.
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You brought up chatgpt there a couple times and I love it because I think this is where this transfer of knowledge is going, is in how these LLMs help brands redefine discovery and awareness and ultimately, you know, how. Are you thinking about the utilization of ChatGPT, other LLMs? Are you thinking about the use of custom GPTs? Are you thinking about how your teams are using it as much as how your clients are using it in both the implementation of SEO work, but also in that awareness and understanding of how consumers are leveraging this technology? You mentioned both earlier, and I'd love for you to dive into both of those themes, how you're teams and clients are using it for execution versus just as it's a learning tool, if anything else, to grow and understand how consumers and users are learning and gaining information online.
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C
Yeah, it is such an exciting moment right now. Honestly, it is such a moment of opportunity for us all to be better at what we do. So like you said, there's kind of two sides of this. There's the client side where they want to know, are we showing up, are we optimizing to be in these spaces? And that's a constant conversation. I am also in the bucket of, I believe GEO or any kind of AI optimization is founded in good SEO. And I don't think we're kind of recreating anything other than doing good jobs for good humans. And if we can continue to do that, that's going to all be great. Then there's the side of how we're using it, how we're optimizing our workflows. I'm a firm believer, and it shouldn't be something that just makes tasks faster, but makes us smarter. So we've built out custom agents for competitive analysis based on different areas. We have custom projects for every one of our clients where I've built a markdown file, where we have to fill in all of their voicing, how they talk about things, who's their demographic, what are the restrictions, compliance for every Client. So then as a team member, if they're working on something or wanting to use ChatGPT, it is already educated at a base level on that client. If you're ever working on something for X client, it should be within their project. It should be within that education. These are things that are not, they're not difficult, they're not super time consuming, but makes us better at our jobs. Also makes outcome much more successful when it. Rather than going into ChatGPT and starting from scratch and putting in a prompt, you're going to get something super vague. We don't want that, we want education. We have to train these tools and it's so fun. We just built a custom tool for a client for localization. So they've been using a translation service for years and it's kind of crappy, honestly, it's always subpar. We trained this tool to not only language based, but look at social cultural references. Here are the type of units to use. This is the formality in this language. These are the people we're talking to and it does a much better job than standard translation. These are the things that we can do and do better, better and service to our clients that we've never been able to do before.
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B
I love this and I'm really curious to dig in a little bit further because one of the beauties of LLMs is that it helps us scale really, really fast.
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C
Yeah, right.
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B
So whether it's in this translation capabilities to identify and refine, or if it's in building better metadata or meta tags for our clients, there's a million different use cases where we can use this to exponentially improve our work. One of the challenges that we have there though is measuring quality. What is quality? How do we define quality in our utility of LLMs? How are you thinking about that in your agency and as you work with clients to ensure that these outputs are genuinely valuable to the consumer, user and audience that you're brands and partners are looking to reach.
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C
All right. No, I think all of that is very fair in terms of. We also can't rely solely on any kind of AI tool right now. There's the education. It's kind of what we put into it. Again, what are we feeding it from a markdown perspective. But then there's also this very critical human in the loop piece. So again with the translation tool, using that as an example, we also have native speakers on staff for all of the languages we're touching. Okay, so I need to stupid proof this thing too that it's not Saying wild and crazy pieces where I don't personally speak Italian, but I can send it over to my pal that does and say, hey, can you at least spend 15 minutes just validating that this is accurate? So we have to, before sending to a client, make sure that this stuff is successfully done and done in an intelligent way. I think it's really easy to just rely on what AI comes out or pumps out to us, but it's still not that smart. It still has hallucinations, it still has inaccuracies. And so as much as we can use it, and we should use it, we have to have validation, human voice and all of these pieces, or else we're going to get stuck in kind of mediocrity.
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B
Yeah, no question. This is the great challenge that we have in the SEO field, which is how do you continuously have that solid output? And I think your example about humans in the loop there with having someone who's a native speaker to check and ensure the quality of the output, it's, I think, the most vital component right now that's missing. Everyone wants to go to full automation, but it just simply is not there yet. If you genuinely want to reach your audience and consumers. When you think about doing this kind of work for clients and you think about the broader remit of Symphonic Digital that has hundreds of clients, one of the great challenges in the industry today is education. How are you teaching and informing and educating this huge pool of clients? These teams probably partner teams as much as your own teams in the utility and practice of good LLM outputs. How are you getting that education out in your organization?
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C
Yeah, and it's one of those things where we need both education and guardrails. So having just like free reign, you can do whatever you want, gets really scary really fast as well. So there are kind of like three parts or three individual groups that you mentioned. So there's kind of the client education piece, there's our partner agencies, and then there's internal and internal. I think it's one of the big things that we've done here at Symphonic Digital is really built a culture of the ability to fail in this space. Like, hey, you have an idea, let's try it. And then if you come back and we try it and we test it and it kind of just doesn't help us or it doesn't work great. We learned what didn't work. Now let's move on to what we could do next. And so even for my team, this is kind of a basic thing, but in terms of our Allocation. I don't allocate a team member 40 hours of billable work in a week. They have 30, 32 hours. And so that rest of the time that they're in office at their desk is pushing forward in these spaces. And it's a conversation. We're meeting every week about these pieces. So this is what I did. Look at this cool thing that Gabby did. What are other use cases? So continually having these conversations and across teams. So the way I'm using it on the SEO side may not be a one to one with programmatic advertising, but there are things that they can do and use from the theory and thought process we're doing. So there's that internal ability to do these things too. I know a lot of companies that have just shut off access to things like ChatGPT and that's hard. I think it's going to limit your ability to grow. And so then there's like the client side. I think clients are either super excited about it and they want AI to write everything, do everything, they want it all done and then you have to pull them back. So again, it's that listening piece. Like are they jumping in both feet? Because they want everything cheaper and faster and we need to talk to them about long term success too. Yeah, my belief in SEO is not running after those bright shiny things in the corner, but rather what the long term play is. So jumping both feet into AI is not the right space. So it's a how can we use this in a healthy manner? And then there's clients that don't want to touch it. They say, you know, you can't use this in any way. I think those businesses are going to struggle and equally educating that, hey, X, Y and Z business is using this. We can see your competitors leveraging and moving faster than you. How can we keep up but not risk? Because there are concerns, there's legal concerns, there's compliant concerns, there's concerns with data and privacy and how things are being fed. It's very valid. So even back to the internal team, we have guardrails around. Do not upload GA4 data to ChatGPT. Do not upload Salesforce data to ChatGPT. We can have conversations, talk in generalities. We cannot risk the potential that this data gets somewhere else. So it's those guardrails and how we do that. And I think the agency, partner agency, is a mix of both educating them on what we can do, the tools, the actual tactical things we're doing, but then also how to use it in a healthy way and how we can continue to inform and educate and push their businesses forward as well.
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B
Yeah, it's the great challenge that we all have as leaders right now is how do we keep the education train going across clients, our internal teams, the executives we work with. It's a constant, I think, a need that our industry has and I think it's one of the reasons why there's so many people going to trade shows. Right. In our prep session here, we were talking about Brighton SEO and just it's a great community to be around. There's just a lot of knowledge sharing that just takes place in those kinds of settings. As you think about how we go about measuring and seeing kind of the signals that are trending or shifting AI discovery, I'd love to hear what you're looking at, Lindsey. What are the key signals that help you know that these shifts or changes in behavior are happening, that the LLM responses are meeting our customer's brand sentiment or message? How are you looking at those signals and what are you using to to truly understand if the efforts and work that your teams are putting into play are having an impact in this new form of discovery?
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C
Yeah, I think that first wave, where it used to be like you're going to get impressions first and then clicks and then conversions, I think that's really adjusted. I love impression data. I think that there is a lot of value in understanding where we're being seen. But what we're shifting to is so a tool that we like a lot is SEO monitor. We use that a ton for our visibility tracking. So it's a daily keyword tracking tool. You feed it the ones you want and we're able to see movement. And I think tracking against competitors is absolute critical. Again, reporting up. No leader is upset when we're beating their biggest competitor. Everybody wants to see that we're winning even if we're losing traffic. But I'm like, hey, you're beating the big guy in this space or you're maintaining against the big guys in this space. That is something that nobody's going to be upset about and we need to lean into. And tools like SEO monitor, they do a fantastic job with both traditional Google AIO and they're moving into the LLM space. Again, still really apprehensive because it's not keyword based. So tracking by keywords is really rough. But visibility and again, tracking against competitor visibility. It's not the hard tangible numbers, but it's those indicators, those early on ones that we can say we're moving in the right direction. And again, as we forecast, some of this is okay, what's moving in the right direction. And we'll start to bring those money figures in in the next three, six, nine months. Whatever it happens happens to be right.
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B
And that wraps up this episode of the Voices Search podcast. A huge thank you to Lindsay Nelson, VP of SEO at Symphonic Digital for joining us. If you'd like in touch with Lindsey, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit voicesofsearch.com you can also connect with her company symphonic digital@symphonicdigital.com if you haven't subscribed yet and would like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feedback, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.